With the highly development of the computer technology, a variety of I/O buses of high data transmission bandwidth and high data transmission throughput has come out to facilitate the data transmission between the processor and the peripherals. In a computer system, the motherboard is used to set up a plurality of electronic elements, such as the processor slot, memory module slot or system bus slot. For the current computer system, the PCI (peripheral component interconnect) bus is the most widely used system I/O bus for interconnecting numerous peripherals in a computer system. The PCI bus is advantageous in terms of high data transmission bandwidth and high data transmission throughput, and it has been commonly adopted by all the computer manufacturers as a standard system I/O bus in a computer system.
Formerly, the debug operation for the motherboard is carried out by virtue of a debug card. However, the debug card is a PCI device which can be plugged into the PCI slot of the computer system, and it is incapable of getting aware of the status of other interface cards. In addition, if the error message from the peripherals of the computer system is detected, it can not provide the remote server with a gateway to repair the defective peripherals in the computer system. As a result, the configuration settings of a conventional debug card is quite disadvantageous to the remote repair operation.
In recent years, the system management bus (also referred to as SMBus or SMB) has been gradually introduced into the computer system to serve as a data transmission interface for power management operation or system monitoring tasks. As is well known in the art, the system management bus is capable of permitting up to 128 peripherals to communicate with other peripherals in the computer system. If the known system management bus can be taken as a communication interface for detecting the status of peripherals of the computer system and simulating the function of peripherals, it would become a global solution for obviating the drawbacks in performing the system monitoring process and remote repair operation by way of a conventional I/O device such as a debug card.